The question was delivered as directly as a right-down-the-pipe fastball: Did you expect this kind of season?
But Chris Colabello read it like a backdoor slider.
“That’s kind of a loaded question,” he said, grinning.
Which, of course, it was.
If Josh Donaldson, Troy Tulowitzki, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion or any number of Toronto Blue Jays had led baseball’s most productive offense with a .321 batting average and carried an .886 on-base-plus-slugging percentage, nobody would have asked.
But Colabello is not like the others.
He is a 31-year-old first baseman and outfielder who did not make the team out of spring training and has taken one of baseball’s most serpentine roads to the big leagues: four years at Division II Assumption College, seven years playing in an independent league and running through too many stop signs to count.